


Memento

by animalker



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2018-04-07 06:37:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4253127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/animalker/pseuds/animalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merrill keeps things she finds, and Hawke finds things she keeps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memento

Hawke is exhausted. Every muscle aches, and she’s going to have a solid pattern of bruising down her side tomorrow. Her red hair is in a tangle, kept back with one of her hairbands she carries around just in case, and its a mess of blood and gore. She puts her helmet down on her desk as Phobos settles onto the floor by the empty fireplace and stretches out happily. She frees her gauntlets and sets them aside. Bath first, then clothes, then she’ll polish her armour and sword. Bodahn always insists he can do it for her, but its her armour, her weapon. She’d inspect it closely if he did. She will not have it unreliable in battle. She knows every nick and dent, knows the weak points that might make her vulnerable. 

No. Nobody deals with her weapons and armour except herself. It’s her hard and fast rule. 

“Ah, you’re back!” Bodahn says, leaning out of the adjacent room. 

“Evening.” 

“I had several of your friends drop by today, to ask about you. Were you… alone all day?” 

“I had Phobos. Anything happen I should know about?” 

“No messere.” 

“Good. That will be all.” She unbuckles her belt and leaves it on the table, sets to working off her rings and necklace. She can feel the weight of Bodahn’s sad eyes on her back. He’s been doing that for a week now. She doesn’t need his pity. She’s never needed anyone’s help or pity, and it is an unwelcome heaviness between her shoulders. 

She strips efficiently, hooking her armour on it’s stand and untucking her undershirt, then heads up the stairs. She ignores her mother’s room, and the flowers someone has left. No doubt it was Merrill. There’s still soil clinging to the roots. She goes into the bathroom, pulls her shirt over her head and drops it to the side. Bodahn always makes sure the bath is the first thing ready when she gets home. She’s usually splattered in things she doesn’t like to think about. After the first time she’d stumbled home, a total mess, and frightened the neighbours kid back in Lowtown, her mother had flat out refused to give her food until she was clean. She takes her hair out, accidentally breaking the band when it got stuck on a curl mattered with gristle, a sharp snap of elastic onto her hand. She grumbles as she pulls off her pants and underwear, kicking them aside. 

The bath is warm despite being too short for her. She always ends up with half her legs out of the water. She doesn’t mind. She takes a breath, closes her dark eyes and sinks underneath the water. She would drift like this for hours if she could, she thinks. The water is not heavy, nor oppressive- it's suffocating, true, but it's also a gentle caress, and the world around her is muffled for a change. Her lungs burn, but its a good burn, a burn she understands, a pain she uses in battle to make adrenaline surge through her blood. She surfaces when she has to, coughing a bit, pushing her hair back from her forehead. 

The door slams shut a few minutes later, Phobos starts barking happily, and Merrill’s cheery voice floats up from the entry. Hawke smiles despite herself, and then leans over the edge of the bath, reaching for the soap she uses on her hair. She’s halfway through rubbing it into a lather when Merrill sticks her head in. 

“Ma'vhenan!” She says, smiling brightly when she sees her. “Where have you been all day? I looked for you but nobody had seen you, and I-” 

“Wounded Coast. Killed some slavers.” She says, and rubs her hair vigorously, lather pink with blood. “You?” 

“After… well, Isabela showed me around a boat! It was lovely.” 

“…was Isabela allowed on the boat?” 

“She pretended she didn't know anything, and got us a tour. Then she... well, we weren't on the boat for _long_ , exactly.” 

Hawke shook her head, then took a breath and ducked underwater to get the soap out. She wiped the soapy water out of her eyes and looked back up at her. “I’ll be out soon. Bodahn’s probably got dinner ready, if you’d like to eat.” 

Merrill hesitated, then nodded, playing with the necklace around her neck, white armour unmarred and clean. She padded over, kissed her forehead and left, closing the door quietly behind her. She sighed, leaning the back of her head onto the rim of the bath. Her relationship with Merrill was new and ever since her mother had… lately, Hawke had been barely around. 

Your mother is dead, she thinks ruthlessly. Think it. Don’t avoid it like a child! She is dead because you weren’t fast enough. She still remembers those awful black stitches cradling her neck, the punctures in her skin, the rotting flesh smell as she’d cradled her. She hadn’t kissed her cheeks. It would’ve been a foolish kindness to a dead woman and the thought had raised bile in her throat. 

Her mother lay in ashes after this morning. Sebastian had been kind and organised the service. She wipes the bathwater from her face and stands up, stepping out and reaching for the towel by the side. She hasn’t cried about it. She doesn’t plan on starting, or she’ll never stop. She is thrumming with the familiar, bitter need to hit something. Perhaps she could go out tonight. There are always fools in Lowtown looking to rob someone. She could leave her armour behind, her sword, use her fists, get into a bar brawl. She can almost taste the metallic tang of blood in her mouth, and she leans on the door, hair wet on her neck and robe loose. She'd done it a lot after the Deep Roads. Merrill had been the one to shake her out of it, but... 

Clothes, she thinks. Clothes, then I'll go to Lowtown. It's safer than full armour, safer than a real fight, it's just a brawl. 

She pads to her room with bare feet, leaving a trail of drips behind her. It's a muggy summer evening. The floor will dry. She is regretting the warm water now, because it has not left her any cooler. When she opens the chest and reaches in to find suitable clothes, her hand closes around glass and she frowns, pulling out a little glass orb. A marble. She stares it, then pushes her clothes out of the way. There are a few things in there; a smooth grey rock, a note in her own penmanship telling Merrill tersely to be ready by eight tomorrow morning, a whiskey glass smuggled from the Hanged Man. 

She sighs and takes them out of her chest, piling them on the desk near her journal that has more blank pages than filled, much to Varric’s dismay. Merrill picks up things here and there. How they found her way into her trunk, she’ll never know, but Merrill can be a bit scatterbrained. Either that, or Bodahn tucked them away, despite Hawke making it clear she prefers to clean her own room. He’s been hovering lately. 

Maybe something in the closet. She just needs some pants and a shirt, something she can go out in, something she doesn’t mind if it gets ruined. She instead finds a book, half open and pressed flowers between the pages, and a scarf she recognises. Her mother’s. She grips the lacy blue material and grimaces. Her mother hadn’t worn this for years, not since Carver puked on it. She’d said it was ruined, despite the fact not a trace of the old stain remains. She'd always worn it to the Chantry when they went for services. Hawke had never paid much attention to them, and had gotten her hand slapped for misbehaving more than a couple of times. 

“Ah, you’re...” Merrill trailed off when she saw what she’s holding, and the pause is awkward and weighted. Hawke's not sure what Merrill's waiting for. For her to break over a stupid scarf? 

“I didn’t realise she still had this.” 

“She gave it to me.” Merrill says, brushing imaginary dust off her sleeve nervously. She’s changed out of her armour. Her shirt is ill fitting. Must be one of hers. “When I first moved to Kirkwall. Well, after that. Remember when she invited us all over before you left for the expedition-” 

“I remember.” She interrupts, folding it and sticks it on the top shelf. Her mother had worn that on the day Hawke had her first kiss, nervous and fumbling with a girl called Allison behind the barn. She’d come back, flushed and mussed, and her mother had smiled knowingly, then asked to meet the young man. She gripped her hands into fists. “Can you keep your junk out of my stuff?” She snaps, jaw aching. 

“I… of course. I’m sorry, I didn’t realise-” 

She slammed the closet doors. That stupid scarf, she thinks. How can a stupid scarf unravel her after all this? “Why do you even have them? I mean, a rock? A marble?” She sounds angrier than she means to, and Merrill shrinks a little. “Sorry.” She said, pressing a hand over her eyes, and the guilt presses heavy on her shoulders, like it has since Carver was crunched into the ground, scream abruptly cut short. “Sorry.” 

“It’s alright-” 

“No, it’s not.” She sits on the floor next to the bed and looks at her clean, soap scented hands, calloused and hardened from years of using a sword. There is a scar across her knuckles, newly healed. She’d broken it on a wall after Gamlen had been told, then proceeded to ignore the throbbing pain for a few hours. It had kept her awake. Kept her alert. Anders had told her, when Merrill had gotten someone to fetch him, that it would leave a scar because of the delay. Just this morning, her scarred hands had held the urn of her mother, but it was better than her brother got. 

“They’re mementos.” Merrill says finally, and tips a mismatched handful of items onto the bedspread, sits cross-legged on the bed. She picks up an earring, flips it in her hand as Hawke cranes her neck upwards to see. It is a silver hoop, with carvings that catch the light. “Mahariel gave this to me. He said he saw it while hunting one day. He found the Eluvian just a week later.” 

Hawke knows the story. He had been Merrill’s friend. The man Anders spoke of sounded very different to Merrill’s stories. “What about the flowers?” 

“I like pressing them.” She laughs, a little breathlessly. “Nothing special there. Now, this one is- was my mother’s. She gave it to me when I left the Alerion clan.” It’s a little whittling of a child and mother, and Hawke turned it over in her hand. The eyes are pitted, and the nose smoothed over from years of cradling. She wonders if Merrill remembers what her mother looks like. She wonders how long it will take before she forgets her own. 

“The marble?” 

“That’s my newest one.” She takes the statue and presses the marble into her hand. It’s heavier than she expected. “I found it on the Coast, after Aveline tried to talk to Donnic?” 

Hawke smiles, rolling it between two fingers. “She was useless.” 

“It worked out in the end.” Merrill said, then laughed. “And you can’t talk. I flirted with you for a year before you noticed!” 

“It worked out in the end.” 

Merrill smiled, and she reached for the rock. It was smooth, and there was a slight dip in one side. No doubt Merrill had worried with it often. “This?” 

“When I met you.” 

She looked up. Merrill’s cheeks were flushed pink. “From Sundermount?” 

“Yes! And then I ended up talking about a man getting attacked by a squirrel. You were so intimidating, ma'vhenan! And beautiful. You looked like you could crush my head with your thighs. I kind of wanted you to. I’m not sure which one made me talk more.” 

She smiled, turning the rock over in her palm. “And all I did was respond in one word answers. You must’ve thought me a brute.” 

“Only a little. I wouldn’t have kept the rock if I’d thought that.” 

“What about the note? I mean, I was just telling you to be up at eight. I didn’t even sign it.” 

“You saved my life, remember?” Hawke frowns, because no, she doesn’t. “The first time? You cut someone in half who was going to stab me. You do that a lot. Cut people in half, I mean. And then you came over after the battle, picked me off the ground and told me to put my back to a wall next time.” 

“Sounds like me.” She admitted. 

“I wanted to kiss you. That was why I kept the note, although the life saving part was certainly noteworthy at the time.” She pushed the earring around in a circle with her finger. Hawke watched her start to gather them up, no doubt to stuff into a box and tuck away. 

“I can put up a shelf, if you like.” 

“Hm?” 

“For your collection.” 

“Where would we put it?” 

“Above my desk, maybe.” She says, looks up at her. Merrill is playing with the wooden statue of the daughter and mother, eyes far away. 

“I’d like that.” 

“Me too.” Hawke reached up, settled a hand on her knee. “You’re too good for me, love.” She murmured, closing her eyes and resting her head on the mattress. “I thought it would be better if i was alone. I’ve been… thoughtless.” Merrill leans down and kisses her forehead. Hawke thinks of her mother lying in ashes, of her brother who they left behind, of her father who had lingered for weeks before wasting away, of her sister in the Wardens who hates her, and never sends any letters. “I can’t do this.” She says simply. 

Merrill slid off the bed to sit next to her, bringing her arm around her waist and kissed her cheeks, left and right, cupping her face in her hands. Hawke felt the choking bubble of tears catch her throat, and she half-gasped, half-sobbed. Merrill swallowed like she was going to say something but stayed silent instead, resting her head on hers, and it is a relief when the tears come.


End file.
